Alienation

How to spell alienation

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce alienation

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alienation mean?

1. nounA feeling of isolation, estrangement, or being cut off from other people, a group, or one's surroundings.
2. nounIn law, the transfer of ownership of property or a right from one party to another.

Alienation in a sentence

• Long shifts in an empty office deepened her sense of alienation.

• The contract restricted the alienation of the land without prior consent.

• The survey measured worker alienation across several large factories.

• The deed prevents the alienation of these shares to anyone outside the family.

Where does alienation come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin alienatio, a noun meaning 'a transfer to another' or 'estrangement', which was built on the verb alienare, 'to make something another person's'. That verb in turn came from alienus, 'belonging to another, foreign or strange', which itself grew from alius, the plain Latin word for 'other'. English took the word in through Old French during the late 1300s, at first largely in the legal sense of handing over property to someone else, and only later broadening to the emotional sense of a person feeling cut off or made to feel like a stranger. The same alius root sits quietly inside the everyday word 'alien', and noticing that shared core helps with the spelling: the word keeps the single l and the i-e-n of 'alien' before the -ation ending is added. The psychological and sociological sense familiar today, a sense of isolation from society or from one's own work, was popularised in the nineteenth century, partly through translations of philosophical and economic writing.

How the word is built

• alien- (from Latin alienus: belonging to another, foreign)
• -ation (noun of action or state)